Motorists will likely have an extra 20 miles to travel until Sunday evening as a stretch of the A134 remains closed at Assington because of a burst water main.
Drivers going south from Sudbury are being diverted along a 30-mile route along the A1071, taking them and extra 20 miles all the way to Ipswich and the Copdock roundabout, before going down the A12 to Colchester.
This afternoon, a spokeswoman from Anglian Water said engineers were still working to find out where the leak was coming from but said it was likely the road would not be reopened until tomorrow evening.
“I know it’s going to cause a lot of disruption so we’re really sorry about that,” she said, adding the company was trying to fix the leak “as quickly as possible”.
However, she added: “There have been some motorists trying to go down there. The network service support manager is down there at the moment to give a bit of extra customer support.”
She said there were “open excavations” taking place on the road, meaning it was best cars did not try to get through while the road was being dug up.
She confirmed all the properties in Assington still had their water supply.
The distance from Assington to where the diversion rejoins the A134 is measured as 29.9 miles on Google maps. Without the diversion it is nine miles and takes about 15 minutes.
A Suffolk County Council spokeswoman said the diversion route needed to be of an equivalent standard to the route that was being diverted, accounting for the lengthy diversion.
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